Understanding self-healing in service-discovery systems

Service-discovery systems aim to provide consistent views of distributed components under varying network conditions. To achieve this aim, designers rely upon a variety of self-healing strategies, including: architecture and topology, failure-detection and recovery techniques, and consistency maintenance mechanisms. In previous work, we showed that various combinations of self-healing strategies lead to significant differences in the ability of service-discovery systems to maintain consistency during increasing network failure. Here, we ask whether the contribution of individual self-healing strategies can be quantified. We give results that quantify the effectiveness of selected combinations of architecture-topology and recovery techniques. Our results suggest that it should prove feasible to quantify the ability of individual self-healing strategies to overcome various failures. A full understanding of the interactions among self-healing strategies would provide designers of distributed systems with the knowledge necessary to build the most effective self-healing systems with minimum overhead.